Thin Line

By Marisa Demarco

Jowls Aquiver—Can it really be front-page news that a high school hip-hop club put out a track with sexual content and the word "ass"? The biggest, oldest, lamest daily in the state stuck it in the feature space under the clever photo caption "Hip-hop Headache," Thursday, March 8.

At the tail end of the story, no longer on page one, Highland Principal Nikki Dennis is quoted as saying people shouldn't focus on one questionable song but on the seven positive tracks instead. Hear, hear.

One common complaint from young people and minorities is as clear as day in this article: The media only likes us when there's bad news. Reporter Debra Dominguez-Lund's story takes that one step further and turns good news into bad.

Surely this club is a good thing, a place where students are allowed to have a voice and are given an opportunity to interact with the pop culture they're consuming. After all, not everyone's cut out for glee club. A story about a teacher relating to students in a nonstodgy way sounds more like fodder for a pleasant yarn in an often complimentary Journal arts section.

The yardstick this "controversy" is held up to, the tool that measures this thing as A-1 material, comes straight out of the ’50s, when "ass" was a four-letter word. Still, the tale is perfect for whipping the Journal's elderly base into righteous indignation. So what's the point of bringing this teacher, this school and this club a lot of grief by dragging them into the limelight? Beyond the sharp-inhale shock factor, what value is there in this article? Sure ain't worth my 50 cents, but I guess I've got two for you.

Coulter Bombs, F-style—Ann Coulter, fun lady that she is, doesn't think there's anything wrong with variations of a certain slur against gay men (rhymes with "hag"), a word she further describes as "totally excellent." It really means, "wussy," she claims. Therefore, when she made a speech on March 2 and said she couldn't talk about candidate John Edwards because you have to go to rehab when you use the new f-bomb, she was really alluding to his wussiness.

That's like me saying, "I'd like to discuss Annie, but 'anorexic dumbass' is only appropriate in certain company." Clearly, I've made a statement, just as she did, and it'd be pretty difficult for me to later argue otherwise.

What I'm most surprised by is her inability to stick by that statement to its full extent. It's not like her to pull a punch.

Perhaps it had something to do with the seven or so (as of press time) newspapers refusing to carry her column because of what she said. Congratulations to those editors who had the wherewithal to realize that whether it was part of a column or part of a speech, they had a transgression on their hands. For a complete list of papers publishing or not publishing Coulter's inane work, go to mediamatters.org.